[mitchellh]

Ouch! My feelings are hurt. :(

Everyone has a different experience and perception I suppose.

I agree we have a long way to go, but I disagree that our tooling is "very incomplete" OR "un-battle-tested".

Ignoring Vagrant as you did, Consul is used at multi-thousand node (per datacenter) scale by dozens of companies and a couple specific companies are using it at an even larger scale. And that's ignoring the thousands of hobbyist and smaller company usage at dozen to hundred node scale. I only don't mention specific names because I don't have explicit permission, but you'll just have to trust I don't intend to lie here.

Vault as another example: if you interacted with a financial institution, your transaction at some point likely hit a Vault cluster. Did you visit some websites today? One of the world's largest CDNs has fully deployed Vault for internal TLS cert management.

Those are just a couple examples.

Or, ignoring tech usage completely, we just had our first seven-figure quarter after only three quarters of sales (and that was dozens of deals, not just a handful). You just can't get those sorts of numbers without real world usage.

On completeness, I think the adoption speaks for itself. Tools don't get adopted at the scale they're being adopted without being complete enough to productively solve a real pain point. I believe we have a long way to go but what we have already in most of our tools is relatively complete by measure of being able to get real, meaningful, and productive work done.

Its unfortunate that we can't get to every open source issue and resolve every problem for everyone, but please try to understand that the issue inbound across our projects is massive in addition to trying to build enterprise solutions for customers and run a business. We'd love to hire hire hire to handle all the community inbound but that'd be irresponsible of us financially. Our teams are slowly growing and we're also promoting more and more community members to core committers who help out quite a bit, too. Packer has ups and downs since we don't have a full team around it at the moment but its on our radar of things to work on.

Ultimately, we can improve in every area and we'll strive to do so. In the process, we're motivated and encouraged by our community and also by the "serious work" we see our tools doing every day across various industries.

I'll follow up with you via email to see where we've fallen short for you. I find these criticisms educational and would like to see where we went wrong. I'm not doing that to hide anything from the public, but only because its hard to have meaningful back-and-forth discourse in a few nesting levels of comments. :)

[bl4ckcontact]

I, for one, think your tools are brilliant and have made my life as an engineer in a highly regulated environment much easier. I don't make many comments here, but I feel taking the time to thank you and your team for your hard work is needed.

To be sure, there is always room for improvement. HashiCorp does an incredible job at providing active support for the tools they create, and the active community that they've built up over the years is proof of their dedication to their ecosystem.

Keep doing what you're doing, Mitchell!

[Terretta]

> I only don't mention specific names because I don't have explicit permission, but you'll just have to trust I don't intend to lie here.

It's true, he doesn't have permission.

But at least one company in fintech is willing to admit appreciation of Hashicorp tooling.

Anyone curious come chat with Joel in Napa in a couple weeks.

https://www.hashiconf.com/talks/managing-vault-in-a-federate...

And if you're into distributed systems, talk to us seriously:

"From a values perspective, we're trying to understand the way the world works — that's what our business is — and so we're really interested in people that have a sort of deep curiosity, people that have the patience to understand deep and complex systems," Kreiter said. "Now, whether those are biological systems, or economic systems, or political systems, it doesn't really matter. Somebody who has an interest in and an ability to understand that deeply is interesting to us."

And that's why we like Mitchell.

[nixgeek]

Mitchell, I appreciate what you do with Consul and Vault. Starting with Vagrant, you've made the world a little bit better and your sales growth is no surprise.

I've not had much luck with Terraform, I never really "got it" with Otto, it feels like Packer is unloved, and I'm also struggling to understand Nomad (vs. Kubernetes, Mesos, et al).

Hopefully constructive feedback -

There's some disparity between the level of "marketing polish" and "technical polish" with HashiCorp - almost all of the software had hype surrounding the announcement and they have slick websites but launch maturity has varied, and several products have felt like they lacked follow-on investment. Sharp edges haven't always been identified.

Keep pushing. :-)

[woodhull]

I know the hashicorp stack fairly well as we run packer and terraform to provision our production environment and we've considered rolling out consul.

I'm so glad you're killing a product. My complaint has always been that hashicorp was doing so many different products it was unable to actually deliver any of them at high quality.

Packer is a reliable and trusty piece of tech for us, but terraform (which has so much potential) is also so rough around the edges we've wrapped it in a mess of our own tooling to make it somewhat usable.

I hope you can find a way to focus on one or two things and do them well.

[Mizza]

Hey Mitchell, sorry for sneak dissing. I wasn't trying to hate on your efforts, which are greatly appreciated, I was more just trying to poll the community if people actually use the stack in production. Will follow-up in email.

[superswordfish]

It doesn't take an expert sleuth to find things like https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/tags/case-study.html, so your "does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack" comes across pretty clearly as sniping.

[JimDabell]

Vendor-published case studies are pretty worthless IMO. I've seen plenty where the vendor was absolutely despised by anybody working for the client who had to deal with them.

[superswordfish]

Fair enough, I found parent's comment flippant because it suggests that HashiCorp's generous open source work is popular due to some hype conspiracy.

[ChartsNGraffs]

Random positive comment. Thanks for what Hashicorp is doing. You all do a great job with many of the crucial pain points in the SW Dev lifecycle. We're using several of your products to solve some deployment/delivery issues and I can't even imagine how we would go about it without your tools.

[varunsaini]

We have been using Vagrant, Terraform, Packer, Vault etc from some time. While there are some issues(that's true for many tools), I find these tools helpful. Hack, I used terraform to provision my QA cluster right now :)

Thanks for these tools.

[varunsaini]

Also how can I forget Consul.

[roman_sf]

Hi Mitchell,

You guys rock! Hashicorp's tools are fantastic and pleasure to learn and use.

We're a small company and we're going to officially purchase Atlas in few weeks - because it saves tons of time. Also, every developer in our company (rather small company, where people have great flexibility what tools to use) has been cheering and clapping when we demoed CI/CD flow in Atlas. It's so easy to deploy and run services.

Cheers! Roman

[ivarrian]

Thanks Mitchell. We have used Vagrant in the past, Packer currently and are considering Consul in the near future.